Decoding Dragons

[Guild Wars 2] All women wear make-up

I don’t quite know what to think of this. Actually I do, it just might take me a while to sort my actual thoughts out from my feelings about this development. Earlier this week, various bloggers in Europe attended an EU Fanday for Guild Wars 2, held in Brighton. I would have loved to go to this, but as a fairly new ‘guild wars’ fan I didn’t get any advanced notice of it (or I didn’t notice it, take your pick.) The lovely people over at Guildmag have posted a transcription of the Q & A session, and Tasha Darke of Attached to Keyboard posted the first half of that Q & A as well. The first half at ATK is more lore and raid/character focused, whereas the Guildmag section has a lot of pvp questions in it. It is the guildmag section I’m going to be focusing on because it touches on some important things about customisation.

Important, and worrying things.

Others have already posted about how bikini-riffic a lot of armour has turned out to be, when put on a woman in the game. The male version of the same armour is often fully covering, and the woman who is an elementalist dances around in an impractical skirt. That said, there are some adorable outfits and a reasonable range, but for me it adds up to another reason to stick with Guardian and Ranger characters. Although they seem to suffer from bikini syndrome too.

Univers-Virtuels: Will it be possible to create less perfect characters or older [characters]? Because your human especially, are very young and the female all are very pretty. So would it be possible to be more flexible in the character creations?

Kristen Perry: All of the characters creation and the different kinds of options that you have with your characters, all of the races have a  lot of variety. We have facial sliders now, so that you want to have a larger nose, or smaller mouth or maybe a broader jaw, those are available for that and so in addition to that, we’re trying to also lay around different outings like charr. They have the fur that you can choose, there’s your base colour, but then there’s just a multitude of different kind of animal patterns that youll be able to put on them. The asura have similar things, the sylvari have similar things as well, the tattoos with norns and facial hair and different beards and everything like that, we always intended to have a various static and beautiful [character]. Visage for a lot of our character creation, but we’re also trying to give a lot of variety for the people to create what they want to look like.

”GuildMag”

Hurrah for the facial customisations, but the asura/charr stuff sounds very obvious. The question here wasn’t aimed at variations along a narrow line, they want real customisation. Granted I don’t think there was much customisation available in beta, but the question really points at ‘young and pretty humans’. Kristen effectively dodges this by not talking about humans.

Univers-Virtuels: So, at the moment the humans are very young and it’s not possible to make it older as a character, or it will be possible to turn off the make up for woman?

Kristen: I’m not sure, we have some variety in there, but largely we want an idealized beautiful base face, so I think the humans are probably going to remain within a certain spectrum.

Univers-Virtuels: So will it be possible to have no make-up for the womans?

Kristen: I think there are bases with different kinds of make-up on them, so you would be able to choose a face that we have more or less make-up on, if you want something a bit more natural and then use the facial sliders to customize it from there.

Aidan Taylor: So there’s no chance to make a really old ugly character then?

Colin Johanson: I’ve seen a few norn characters that looked pretty beat up.

”GuildMag”

Again, notice how they completely dodge the question about being able to turn make up off. ‘More or less make-up’ is not the same as ‘turned off completely’. I say this as someone who definitely plays with and enjoys the make up feature on SWTOR. The lack of bodily customisation is often made up for with unique hair/makeup/face combos, but at the same time I have some characters who are not at all the sort who would bother with putting swirly stripes around their eyes.

And a few norns looking a bit beat up is not the same as being old or ugly. I know this is a fantasy – I am a young and somewhat attractive woman IRL – sometimes I want to play a crotchety veteran soldier, or a young man who is plain looking but intelligent. Fantasy doesn’t just include the idealised self. Fantasy has a much wider vision than this.

Win some, you lose some

I find the words used in the above quotes very distastefu, especiallyl ‘an idealized beautiful base face’. When the game is supposed to be all about the players choice, and the players customisation – why limit the player in such a way? Yes, less people use the so-called ‘ugly’ faces in Warcraft, but that doesn’t take away from the face that the choice is there.

On the other hand, this is another example that shows how within a games company, certain attitudes are not universal. I’ve become a fan of ArenaNet because their lore tends to avoid the pitfalls that Warcraft walks into with such joy. There are many women in the Ghosts of Ascalon book, and yet they are not tokenised warrior women, they are characters in their own right, with their own individual approaches and foibles. ArenaNet has some of the best public relations in terms of gender and sexuality (although they still have a ways to go in some areas), so to see this regressive attitude towards female beauty and self-adornment is unfortunate.

Yes, I’m still considering that Collector’s Edition.

[Guild Wars 2] All women wear make-up was published on April 5th, 2012, with the tags , , , , , , , , , , , under the Analysis, Guild Wars 1/2 category. There are currently 8 comments on this article so far.

[Warcraft] Pear-shaped Pandas and Frozen Stories

Yes yes, I know I’m late to the party but dammit I’ve got an opinion and I’m going to share it. I need to get over this whole ‘everyone else has already written about it/had the discussion’ thing or I’ll never write anything. So there has been a whole bunch of news released, but since I am not a news blog but an opinion blog I’m going to focus on two points that have been rumbling around my head while I’ve been ill over the past 2 days.

The female Pandaren is Pear-Shaped.

Originally posted by Cradix @ MMO Champion

This is a great comparison here. She still has a waist, but the waist-hip-boob ratio is significantly different in this case. The Pandaren woman has siginficantly chunkier thighs and lower legs, and a much rounder and more bottom heavy torso. While yes, she is not as wonderfully rotund as the male character, I think this character model is a great addition to the range of body shapes available to players. She is what we would call pear-shaped, although an apple shape would have been much better, I think it’s a good start for an MMO character model.

Small steps.

Scholomance and Scarlet Monestary – Frozen in Time

So, I looked at the videos for these instances and I feel like I’m missing something. I was really excited by the prospect of these dungeons getting the Deadmines Treatment, but I am feeling distinctly underwhelmed about it at the moment. The new Troll heroics, Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep have, to a certain extent, sort of moved the stories of the instances further along. Not so much in the case of Shadowfang Keep, but the epic tale of Vanessa Vancleef was one of the highlights of Cataclysm for me. I adored the new Westfall and the build up to the reveal of Vanessa. I do feel it could have done with a little more complexity and depth, but it was a very enjoyable visit to the tensions between the Defias and the Stormwind Monarchy.

The Troll heroics were, I guess, more about player nostalgia than revisiting the story and I do think that was a shame. However Scarlet Monastery and Scholomance were some of my favourite instances when I first started playing. The challenge of healing Scholomance as a fresh 60 holy priest was something I absolutely relished in the pre-Naxx1 days. I’m not sure whether simply updating the existing stuff is enough. I’ve already killed Sally Whitemane once – should I really have to kill this iconic lore character again?

It’s hard to judge before we’ve actually seen these ‘refreshed’ instances. I’m still excited by the potential nostalgia trip, but I kind of want to see what happens NEXT with regards to the Scarlets. I can forgive troll voodoo hanging around like a bad smell long after it’s been vanquished (voodoo always has a way of coming back) but after the epic stories of Lillian Voss, and the Scarlet stories in Northrend I’m not really certain that Scarlet Monastery will be as satisfying to simply ‘revisit’. I would hope that Blizzard have found some ways to tie the story into the new storylines around their zones. Somehow.

[Warcraft] Pear-shaped Pandas and Frozen Stories was published on March 21st, 2012, with the tags , , , , , , , under the Game Development, Warcraft category. There are currently 6 comments on this article so far.

[Warcraft] Pandaren character models and the missed opportunity

I can’t say I actually expected female pandaren to be a similar shape to the male ones. One always hopes that interesting design decisions will be made, but lets not forget that this is an expansion that is based completely on western ‘orientalism’.  As much as it’s cute, and has some amazing ideas in terms of their goals for moving forward with WoW, the breadth of vision is not as speculative and fantastical as one would really hope. So when I originally saw the male Pandaren character design, I had hope that Blizzard would move away from ‘all women are shaped like hourglasses’.

I have a significant hip-waist ratio, despite being out and out obese. I have a waist, and in many ways conform to some ideas of what female ‘beauty’ is. I am already represented in game by the human, dwarf, orc and tauren physiques. Race changing to a dwarf (from a draenei) felt a little like ‘coming home’ because I was finally owning my body type instead of playing out a fantasy. And yet I was still playing out the fantasy by what I was doing and the character I was inhabiting, rather than the appearance of my avatar.

Yet even the gnomes, those smallest of bodies, and the tauren adhere to notions of female beauty. The male character models do too, don’t get me wrong – beefed up male power fantasies that they are. There is some of the long and lanky, but for the most part it’s broad-shoulders and six packs. The male pandaren are much more rotund. Still powerful and strong, but traditional ‘gaming character physique’ they are not.

They have beer bellies! Stout legs, no necks. They also still look awesome. The animations for this new race, from what I have seen, look badass.

The female pandaren. Well. We won’t know until the 19th March. We do have a teaser though, posted on the Warcraft Facebook earlier today.

A lot of similarities to the dwarf woman model. Big hips and chunky thighs, but I seriously doubt that she is small busted, otherwise I’d be chalking this up to a victory for a variation in female body types. I never really expected Blizzard to do anything different, and on the plus size she does look strong. But then so do orcs and tauren, even though I hate the female worgen faces, the physical body is awesome.

Blizzard does variations on the theme of ‘hourglass body shape’ very well. However there is much more variety out there in the world. Just look at the divided reaction to Therazane the Stone Mother. Not to mention the jokes and parodies of her daughter Theradras. A lot of people loved Therazane – that she existed at all, and that she takes no prisoners in her leadership of the Earth Elementals. She wasn’t a villain or a romantic foil – like Lorna Crowley she occupied her own place in the narrative as a standalone character.

Yet to many she was still clearly a joke.

At the end of the day, it looks like the new Pandaren model will be much better received than the last minute worgen. I can only hope that her emotes and voice acting are awesome. I am sad that Blizzard missed the opportunity to bring a little less sexual dimorphism to the table, but thankful that that she isn’t ridiculously slender compared to the male counterpart. Mixed feelings? You betcha.

 

Edit: Apple Cider Mage has her analysis up and made some very pertinent and interesting points about the language used by gamers to talk about character models. I highly suggest reading her post. One comment that leapt out at me from WoW Insider was ‘dwarf women are just the dwarf men with a female skin‘. Which…yeah, this is how character design in videogames has warped our understanding of gendered bodies.

At the end of the day – skeletons aren’t all that dis-similar to each other. You have to know more than a little bit about anatomy and bone structure to tell a female skull from a male one. You have to know about bone width and length, once musculature, cartilage, organs and fat reserves are gone. However the dimorphism in WoW means that female and male will often have different ‘skeletons’ (or stick figures) underlying the main animation. Dwarf women are successful because they aren’t that different from the males in terms of how they move. The differences are more subtle – and many real world women are likely to look like a tall WoW dwarf rather than like the human models.

 

[Warcraft] Pandaren character models and the missed opportunity was published on March 12th, 2012, with the tags , , , , , , , , , , , under the Analysis, Warcraft category. There are currently 13 comments on this article so far.